Susan Sontag among finalists for National Book Critics Circle awards

NEW YORK (AP) _ Book reviewers announce their favorites Thursday night during the annual ceremony for the National Book Critics Circle prizes at New School University. <br><br>Nominees include a 3,300-page

Thursday, March 4th 2004, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ Book reviewers announce their favorites Thursday night during the annual ceremony for the National Book Critics Circle prizes at New School University.

Nominees include a 3,300-page history of violence and a Susan Sontag book on photography that contradicts one of her previous works. Ninety-one-year-old Studs Terkel, the oral historian and self-described champion of the ``uncelebrated,'' will receive a lifetime achievement prize.

Judges had to work hard just getting through ``Rising Up and Rising Down,'' William T. Vollman's seven-volume, 3,300-page examination of violence in human history.

Sontag was nominated for criticism for ``Regarding the Pain of Others,'' a partial refutation of her influential ``On Photography,'' which won an NBCC award in 1978 and contended that repeated exposure to images of violence and suffering numb human emotions. Sontag now believes that such pictures are necessary reminders of what really happens in the world.

Edward P. Jones' ``The Known World,'' about a black slave owner in the antebellum South and a National Book Award finalist, was among the fiction nominees; Anne Applebaum's ``Gulag,'' another NBA finalist, was cited in the general nonfiction category.

Monica Ali's ``Brick Lane,'' Caryl Phillips' ``A Distant Shore,'' Richard Powers' ``The Time of Our Singing'' and Tobias Wolff's ``Old School'' were the other fiction nominees.

Also nominated for nonfiction were Carolyn Alexander's ``The Bounty,'' Paul Hendrickson's ``Sons of Mississippi'' and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's ``Random Family.''

George Marsden, a leading religious historian, was a finalist in the biography-autobiography category for ``Jonathan Edwards.'' Other nominees included Blake Bailey's ``A Tragic Honesty,'' an acclaimed biography of the late fiction writer Richard Yates; Paul Elie's ``The Life You Save May Be Your Own''; Carol Loeb Shloss' ``Lucia Joyce''; and William Taubman's ``Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.''

Besides Sontag's book, criticism nominees were Dagoberto Gilb for ``Gritos,'' Ross King's ``Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling,'' Rebecca Solnit's ``River of Shadows'' and Nick Hornby for ``Songbook.''

Poetry finalists included Carolyn Forche's ``Blue Hour,'' Tony Hoagland's ``What Narcissism Means to Me,'' Venus Khoury-Ghata's ``She Says,'' Susan Stewart's ``Columbarium'' and Mary Szybist's ``Granted.''

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a not-for-profit organization of about 750 book editors and critics. The NBCC awards are prestigious, if not profitable, offering no cash prizes.